‘I need a drink,’ she said tersely. ‘You?’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
She did not offer a choice, but poured whisky into both glasses and handed him one, innocent of ice or niceties. This was not a social occasion. It was the cowboy’s slug of hooch before prairie surgery. She shot her slug straight down her throat and refilled, not offering more to Slider. Then she seemed to see the untidiness of the kitchen, took two swift steps and switched off the lights in there. He was glad she still had the spirit to be house-proud. It gave him more to work with.
They sat in armchairs facing each other. Slider sipped. She looked at him coldly. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘What do you want to know?’
He didn’t need to think. He had his starting-place long thought out. ‘The Lescroit woman’s accusation. You were there that day. What actually happened?’
A spot of colour came into her cheeks. ‘What a thing to—! What makes you think I was there?’
‘Please,’ he said. ‘This is going to take forever if you go the “what makes you think?” route. I know nearly everything. You are going to tell me the rest – for the sake of your clients, remember, if not your own skin. What happened that day?’
‘The woman accused David of molesting her,’ she said rigidly.
‘But it wasn’t David, was it?’
She looked at him as if she would have liked to kill him, but she said, through gritted teeth, ‘No.’
‘It’s not the sort of thing David would do,’ Slider went on conversationally. ‘He could get all the women he wanted without that. It was Bernard Webber who was the bottom-pincher, the one who brushed up against the secretaries in confined spaces.’
She glared. ‘You don’t have to go on.’
‘Webber was out of his room – gone to the lavatory, apparently. But in fact he had slipped into the room where the woman was recovering.’ Her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes bright with mortification, or rage, or something. ‘She woke up, or half-woke. She said, “What are you doing, doctor?” ‘And he said, “Call me David.”’
‘I know!’ she cried.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he told me.’
‘You were in his room when he came back in.’
She nodded, and swallowed, as if it were difficult for her to tell this part. ‘I’d just arrived. I was waiting for him. Then I heard the noise – the woman shrieking. He came in. He said, “There’s the devil to pay.” He said, “We can all still come out of it all right if you go along with whatever I say.”’
‘He asked you to cover up for him?’ Slider said. ‘Why did he think you would do that?’
She squeezed her eyes shut, and said, her lips rigid, ‘We were lovers.’
‘Ah,’ said Slider. It was the last piece in his jigsaw. He’d pretty much worked out what it would look like from the space it left, but coming from her, coloured with the shame she still felt, it was bright and compelling.
She opened her eyes and, as if having got over this hurdle there was nothing more to fear, she sat up straighter and began to talk.
‘We’d been lovers for some time. He was – still is – fantastically attractive; and things had been going badly between David and me. I told you before about his women. He couldn’t leave them alone. It wore me down. Bernard was sympathetic – an old friend I could lean on. At first that’s all it was. He was the only person I could really talk to, who knew David too, and liked him. But I was – lonely. And hurt. Sympathy drifted into comforting, the comforting became physical.’ She looked at him. ‘I’m not proud of it. I know I let myself down. I never intended to be unfaithful to David. But—’
‘These things happen,’ Slider said neutrally. He knew better than to offer her sympathy. ‘You’d gone there that day to see Webber?’
‘I told Stephanie – Bernard’s secretary – it was about fund-raising. Bernard was always generous with charities. I knew David had a procedure, so I’d be able to see Bernard alone. Then all this blew up.’
‘What made you go along with blaming David for the trouble?’
‘Oh!’ she said in frustration, ‘I know how it looks. But it was the only way. Bernard explained it all logically. He said the Lescroit woman was convinced it was David and wouldn’t change her mind. He said he had the influence and the money, he could get David off, but David couldn’t get him off. He said if he took the blame there would still be people who thought it had really been David all the time, because of his reputation. So they’d both be ruined, and his sacrifice would be for nothing.’
‘Sacrifice?’
She had the grace to blush slightly. ‘You must remember I was angry with David for what he had done. He was out of control around women. Even if he didn’t touch the Lescroit woman, it was only a matter of time before he had some kind of affair with a patient and got struck off.’
Slider nodded, as if accepting the point. ‘And what did David say to Webber’s arguments?’
‘David never knew,’ she said. She looked away from him. ‘He thought the woman had just been confused and imagined it all. He swore to me that he didn’t touch her, but he knew he was in trouble all the same. When Bernard said he believed him and promised to make it all right, David was – grateful.’
Slider thought she was ashamed of that: perhaps uniquely in the whole mess, was she ashamed that David had been grateful for being stitched up?
‘So he got David a lighter sentence from the GMC, and he got him a job,’ he said. ‘What did you get?’
She hardened her gaze. ‘Money,’ she said in a cold voice. Slider continued to look at her steadily, and she went on, ‘I was divorcing David. The Lescroit business was the excuse but I was going to anyway. I had to get away from him. I hated him by then. Oh, you don’t know, you can’t imagine what it was like for me! David had betrayed me and broken my heart. Bernard was my rock. He helped me through everything. And his money – a friend’s money – meant I didn’t need to take anything from David. I told him I would pay it back. But he laughed and said he wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘You were still Webber’s mistress?’
‘For a time. But after all the fuss died down, after the divorce came through, Bernard sold the practice, got a government contract and went abroad.’
‘How did Robin Frith fit in with all this? Weren’t you involved with him long before the divorce was finalized?’
She looked annoyed. ‘What business is it of yours?’
‘Everything is now my business,’ he said, unmoved. ‘I thought we had established that.’
‘I don’t see what it has to do with anything,’ she went on, with extra high dudgeon to compensate for co-operating, ‘but it was Bernard’s idea that I should cultivate Robin. Felicity – Bernard’s wife – was having suspicions about me, and he wanted to divert them. She thought I was divorcing David for him. Bernard had already decided to divorce Felicity and he wanted it to be amicable, otherwise it would have cost him dear. So she mustn’t think there was anything between Bernard and me. Robin was a smokescreen.’ She shrugged. ‘He’d always been in love with me, and I knew I could control him, so it worked very well.’
God, she was a cold one! Slider thought. ‘So Bernard wasn’t divorcing in order to marry you?’
‘God, no. He’d decided on it long before we were involved. And marriage was never on the cards between us. I wouldn’t have wanted it any more than him. He and Felicity separated just before he went abroad and I didn’t see him for almost two years.’
She stopped, her eyes inward. When he saw she was not going to resume unprompted, Slider said, ‘It was on his tour abroad that he got everything set up, wasn’t it?’